With AEM 5.6 Adobe introduced a new touch-optimized UI with responsive design for the author environment. This differs considerably from the original classic UI as it is designed to operate on both touch and desktop devices.

Bottom-up design to ensure these principles are applied to every element and component

AEM Technology Stack

AEM uses the Granite platform as a base and the Granite platform includes, amongst other things, the Java Content Repository.

Granite

Granite is Adobe's Open Web stack, providing various components including:

An application launcher

An OSGi framework into which everything is deployed

A number of OSGi compendium services to support building applications

A comprehensive Logging Framework providing various logging APIs

The CRX Repository implementation of the JCR API Specification

The Apache Sling Web Framework

Additional parts of the current CRX product

Obs!

Granite is run as an open development project within Adobe: contributions to the code, discussions and issues are made from across the entire company.

However, Granite is not an open source project. It is heavily based on several open source projects (Apache Sling, Felix, Jackrabbit and Lucene in particular), but we draw a clear line between what is public and what is internal.

Granite UI

The Granite engineering platform also provides a foundation UI framework. The major goals of this are to:

Client Side vs Server Side

The client-server communication in the Granite UI consists of hypertext, not objects, so there is no need for the client to understand the business logic

The server enriches the HTML with semantic data

The client enriches the hypertext with hypermedia (interaction)

Client-side

This uses an extension of HTML vocabulary, provided so that the author can express their intention to build an interactive webapp. This is a similar approach to WAI-ARIA and microformats.

It primarily consists of a collection of interaction patterns (for example, asyncronously submitting a form) that are interpreted by JS and CSS codes, run on the client-side. The role of the client-side is to enhance the markup (given as the hypermedia affordance by the server) for interactivity.

The client-side is independent of any server technology. As long as the server gives the appropriate markup, the client-side can fulfil its role.

Currently the JS and CSS codes are delivered as Granite clientlibs under the category:

granite.ui.foundation and granite.ui.foundation.admin

These are delivered as part of the content package:

granite.ui.content

Server-side

This is formed by a collection of sling components that enable the author to compose a webapp fast. The developer develops components, the author assembles the components to be a webapp. The role of the server-side is to give the hypermedia affordance (markup) to the client.

Currently the components are located in the Granite repository at:

/libs/granite/ui/components/foundation

This is delivered as part of the content package:

granite.ui.content

Differences to the Classic UI

The differences between Granite UI and ExtJS (used for the classic UI) are also of interest:

This library contains a Granite UI component for each Coral element. A component is content driven, with its configuration residing in the repository. This makes it possible to compose a Granite UI application without writing HTML markup by hand.

Purpose:

component model for HTML Elements

component composition

automatic unit and functionality testing

Implementation:

repository based composition and configuration

leveraging testing facilities provided by the Granite platform

JSP templating

This library of foundation components can be used or extended by other libraries.

ExtJS vs matching Granite UI components

When upgrading ExtJS code to use the Granite UI, the following list provides a convenient overview of ExtJS xtypes and node types with their equivalent Granite UI resource types.

Granite UI Administration Components

The Granite UI administration components build on the foundation components to provide generic building blocks that any administration application can implement. These include, amongst others:

Global Navigation Bar

Rail (skeleton)

Search Panel

Purpose:

Unified look-and-feel for administration applications

RAD for administration applications

Implementation:

Pre-defined components using the foundation components

Components can be customize

Coral UI

Hämta

Coral UI (CUI) is an implementation of Adobe's visual style for their touch-optimized UI, that has been designed to provide consistency in the user experience across multiple products. The Coral UI provides everything you need to adopt the visual style used on the authoring environment.

Viktigt:

Coral UI is a UI library made available to AEM customers for building applications and web interfaces within the boundaries of their licensed use of the product.

Use of Coral UI is only permitted:

When it has been shipped and bundled with AEM.

For use when extending the existing UI of the authoring environment.

Adobe corporate collateral, ads, and presentations.

The UI of Adobe-branded applications (the font must not be readily available for other uses).

Applications/components/web pages that are not clearly connected to Adobe.

The Coral UI is a collection of building blocks for developing web applications.

Designed to be modular from the start, each module forms a distinct layer based on its primary role. Although the layers have been designed to support each other, they can also be used independently if needed. This makes it possible to implement Coral’s user experience in any HTML-capable environment.

With the Coral UI it is not mandatory to use a particular development model and/or platform. The primary goal of Coral is to provide unified and clean HTML5 markup, independent of the actual method used to emit this markup. This might be used for client or server-side rendering, templates, JSP, PHP or even Adobe Flash RIA applications - to name just a few.

HTML Elements - The Markup Layer

At the most basic level, a HTML element is a HTML tag with a dedicated class name. More complex elements can be composed of multiple tags, nested inside each other (in a specific manner).

The CSS is used to provide the actual look and feel. To make it possible to easily customize the look-and-feel (e.g. for the case of branding) actual style values are declared as variables that are expanded by the LESS pre-processor during runtime.

Element Plugins

Many of the HTML elements will need to exhibit some sort of dynamic behavior, such as opening and closing pop-up menus. This is the role of the element plugins, which accomplish such tasks by manipulating the DOM using JavaScript.

A plugin is either:

designed to operate on a specific DOM element; for example, a dialog plugin expects to find DIV class=dialog

generic in nature; for example, a layout manager provides layout for any list of DIV or LI elements

Plugin behavior can be customized with parameters, by either:

passing the parameters by means of a javascript call

using dedicated data-* attributes tied to the HTML markup

Though the developer can select the best approach for any plugin, the rule of thumb is to use:

data-* attributes for options related to HTML layout (for example, to specify the number of columns)

API options/classes for functionality related to data (for example, constructing the list of items to display)

The same concept is used to implement form validation. For an element that you want validated, you must specify the required input form as a custom data-* attribute. This attribute is then used as an option for a validation plugin.

Obs!

HTML5-native form validation should be used whenever possible and/or expanded upon.

Purpose:

Provide dynamic behavior for HTML Elements

Provide custom layouts not possible with pure CSS

Perform form validation

Perform advanced DOM manipulation

Implementation:

jQuery plugin, tied to specific DOM element(s)

Using data-* attributes to customize behavior

An extract of example markup (note the options specified as data-* attributes):

The cardLayout plugin lays out the enclosed UL elements based on their respective heights and also taking the parent’s width into consideration.

HTML Elements Widgets

A widget combines one or more basic elements with a javascript plugin to form "higher level" UI elements. These can implement more complex behavior and also a more complex look and feel than a single element could deliver. Good examples are the tag-picker or rail widgets.

A widget can both trigger and listen to custom events to cooperate with other widgets on the page. Some widgets are actually native jQuery widgets that use the Coral HTML elements.